I had every intent of writing three screenplays this year. I think I stopped on page 8 of the first one. It's so hard to give a fuck anymore.

Know what's retarded? I had an in-language socially-conscious put-it-in-Surround Oscarbait short and it was the most fucking miserable I've ever been mixing (which is, indeed, saying something). It was truly a wretched experience. Two days ago I got paid $500 to do a quick pass on a couple 45-second Instagram videos. I didn't even have to freshen up my coffee. That puts me in the horrific position of wanting to mix a bunch of shit most people will experience under protest with the volume off over the "important" stuff we all got into the industry to do.

I’ve been using the winter break late-night free time that should be used for reading books to learn a new DAW, Fruity Loops, and ditch Logic Pro. All I want to do is create rhythm sections to accompany the many shitty melodies I have recorded using my synthesizer. It’s going well but I’m still climbing the learning curve to get to the point where I can compose rhythms with enough swing and a satisfying groove to not only fit my pre-recorded sounds but give me a backdrop to improvise, which I can do for hours considering I don’t know how to end jam sessions.

I've been working on an end of year reflection for hubski. I not only have not been able to finish it, I haven't been able to start it...except on the imagination's notepad. Also. . .

I've been asked to create a workshop for women in chemistry called: Against Entropy: Building Resilience for an Uncertain Future. I have to work against entropy to get this done. The fun part is I get to ask everyone I know what resilience means in their own lives.

Additionally: half a dozen socks, twice as many songs, a one-page RPG module about some kids accidentally succeeding in some occult woodlands activities, and a few little creative coding projects that are cluttering up my desktop.

If you can make a reasonably close sketch, any jeweler worth their salt can turn it into a cast piece. You bring in a drawing and they'll CAD it, then you iterate. Very simple. You don't need to find anyone, because that's part of the service that many custom jewelers already offer.

Ooh! I like that idea much better than mine (which have mostly consisted of: knitting a pair of gloves with a gold band on the ring finger, or learning how to do some blacksmithing and making a simple ring). I'll probably buy a nicer ring once I can afford it, but we've been talking about getting married for a few years now, and even have a rough estimate of when the wedding will be (August of 2019). I figure there's no reason to hold off proposing anymore, and I'm not one to let the lack of a fancy ring stop me.

I've had these two pictures sitting on my table in front of me for about two weeks now. I think they're both decent enough to where I need to take the backgrounds seriously. The only problem is, drawing backgrounds are always a struggle for me and sometimes when I get a good start in the foreground, I completely bungle the background, ruining the whole picture. So, I don't know what I'm gonna get today, but I'm gonna sit down with these for the next hour or so and see if I can't knock something out.

Also, after years of saving up/putting it off, Dala and I finally got a fancy, super mega pixel, swap out the lens, it has an easy mode but really you should be doing everything in manual, camera. My goal is to learn to use it well enough that by spring, I'll be able to get some amazing pictures of the lizards in the yard. And cars. And birds. Bugs. Fuck, whatever looks pretty and stands still long enough for me to get a picture of it. So, probably not birds.

PROTIP: I can do everything full manual, but it really slows you down. I started shooting aperture priority in like '99 and aside from taking pictures of the moon, night cityscapes and really challenging contrast situations, I get the picture 100% of the time.

Chances are good that you'll be happiest with the results with the aperture fully open (I'ma guess the lens you have is an f/4-f/5.6). If you get vignetting at the lens' widest, bump it up a stop.

Thanks. I'm excited to learn to work the camera. We picked out the Nikon D3400 Bundle because it was basically a camera with an extra free lens and a bag and there's barely a bad review out there for it. Compared to the more than half busted point and shoot camera it's replacing, it looks both awesome and a bit like a lot to take in.

I really appreciate the pro-tip, but I have a question. I'm familiar with the relationship between aperture, shutter speed, and exposure, but the term vignetting is new to me. What does it mean and what does it actually indicate?

Vignetting is where the light distribution isn't even from edges to center. It generally means your light-gatherer (the lens) isn't a perfect match with your light-recorder (the sensor of the camera). It's most likely to happen when the hole the light goes through (the aperture) is at its largest (lowest number; for your lenses, f/3.5 and f/4.5).

This is not limited to cheap lenses; I've got a 16-35 f/2.8 that cost me $1500 used and wide-open it vignettes on a 35mm frame size. Granted, enough people griped about this that Canon remade the lens within the year. And you can usually deal with this sort of thing in post.

I don't know how stretched your finances are at this point, what with the camera and all, but please god start to use something more friendly than Gimp. You're now investing in your own skills and your own skills are heavily reliant on the tools they're trained in. Don't invest in software that nobody with any self-respect uses.

Vignetting is where the light distribution isn't even from edges to center.

Interesting. Partly because there are software filters that people use to actively get that effect, but also partly, because I figure with software it'd be less of an issue, because people are able to take a wider shot than needed and then crop it to their desire on the computer (at least, that's what I do).

Speaking of software, I've heard good things about Krita but that's more for drawing than for editing photos. The only other open source program I know of other than GIMP is LightZone which strikes me as a simplified version of Adobe Lightroom. Wikipedia has a whole list of programs, so I'm gonna do some looking into that this week as well.

GIMP? I'm pretty decent at it, but I dunno, I'm stubborn in the "making things work whether or not it's easier to get something new" kind of sense. But then again, I never thought about taking photos that I really care to edit really well and now here I am.

Plenty o'Instagrammers love the old vignette. I've been known to use it myself. However, you'd generally rather have control of it than have to deal with it. Decent software like Lightroom will allow you to apply lens-specific profiles to deal with all the optical distortions introduced by the hardware.

I don't know any of the free stuff, unless you're talking phones (I use Snapseed). It reflects my bias, no doubt: I believe photo software should make it easier to get what you shot so that you can spend more time shooting. Thus, I never made more than a half-hearted attempt at doing any processing in Photoshop. Lightroom I can process a month's worth of photos in half an hour. Anything needing more hard-core tweakitude than Lightroom can do, I throw at creative kit.

Although, Lightroom is now shit on a stick and apparently Macphun saw enough weakness that they're now making Luminar for PC. I might go that way myself.

Well, actually, I started this thing 4 years ago. I wrote a short and pretty bad one-act for a theatre class. It was about a musician (Shigeto, loosely) who breaks up with his girlfriend and then writes an album about it. Last spring, I showed it to a friend and she said she seriously thought it had potential. I started rewriting it as a screenplay. From May through July, I made pretty good progress. I have a full outline and just under 20 pages of text. But then, you know. Work. School. Life. I haven't touched it since, which is a shame, because I do still kind of want to make it. Not that I'm remotely qualified to shoot or direct a short film.

I'd like to say that finding a new job will prevent me from getting anything more done, but to be honest, that's not what'll prevent me. After all, I've been out of school for two weeks with no job and I didn't touch the file until I checked its Date Created 2 minutes ago.

In the meantime, I've done some conceptual work on a novel. It's a sci-fi time travel thing, but it's mostly actually about a father-son relationship. We'll see if that goes anywhere. (Right now it's a couple bullet points and about a page and a half of actual writing.)

So basically all you see here except that midsection in the middle is background. Medium - collage (important in like, three more lines, don't worry)

I know what is the foreground/what it needs to be

I've struggled for months with a couple of pieces:

1) how to drastically differentiate the foreground image from the background

2) what materials to use to create the foreground (to give that piece of the collage the meaning I want, as well as to help achieve #1)

And also, but unrelated to the above literal artistic stump-age, whether this piece of work is useful/important to me, enough to finish it (or whether I might be more glad to chuck the whole thing, in part for what it represents to me), or whether it's just kind of self-obsessed and masturbatory.

Sucks cuz everything up to here, I 100% thought out, figured out, the pieces I selected to collage from all made sense and worked great, etc etc. This piece doesn't have to mean anything to anybody but me and I don't care about other people 'interpreting' it or etc. I know that I'm the only person who's probably ever going to look at it and know, understand, or even care what's driven this piece, the personal meaning behind all the elements in the piece, etc, etc. I know it's not professional art and it won't ever be hung or appreciated anywhere. That's ok. This piece, from the start, was really and truly intended as by me, for me, about me, and about overcoming/rising above.

I don't think I have to finish this piece to successfully overcome anything or put anything behind me. But I think the piece of art would be a nice depiction for me that meant a lot to me about how I felt at this time in my life.